Throughout the ski season, The Denver Post will take a look at the special role skiing and snowboarding play in the lives of so many Coloradans, from young to old, from beginner to black diamond.

Silverton – Her career was soaring. She ‘boarded every day, and her performances were harvesting accolades and medals. She loved her house, her pals, her work. Everything in Montana was perfect.

Then her boyfriend, Aaron Brill, the man she would later marry, returned from an across-the-West road trip and reported he had found it. The perfect basin for a steep, hand-hewn ski hill.

Jenny Brill – then Jenny Ader – was reluctant to leave the good life. But in the winter of 1999, she drove up the dead-end road outside of a nearly dead-end village named Silverton and was instantly hooked.

“It was the sickest terrain I’d ever seen, and I knew I couldn’t let Aaron do it alone,” Jenny says.

So she made the leap, trading everything she loved about life in Montana for a life with her boyfriend in a van at the base of a muddy collection of steep mining claims totaling 350 acres. Soon, Aaron’s dream of building their own ski area here in southwestern Colorado became her dream. Eight years later, they’ve created a one-lift slice of powder heaven.

But nearly every step of the way – from the time they moved to Colorado in that shuttle van, where they lived for six months – tested the happy-go-lucky gal to her breaking point. The backbreaking installation of a secondhand chairlift in 2000. The grueling permitting process with the Bureau of Land Management that began in 2001 with a $24,000 check and hopes of a six-month review of their plan to access 1,300 acres of federal land bordering their 350 acres – a process that ended up taking four years and costing several hundred thousand of dollars. The nagging lawsuits from a cantankerous neighbor over alleged trespassing. The life in a remote town of 500. The first years of nurturing a vision everyone said was unattainable and overcoming her own doubts it would work.

At the end of every step was a false summit, deceptively luring her deeper into the dream while delaying the downhill thrills that follow skiing’s greatest toils. Skier visits were doubling, even quadrupling, with each season since the Brills first welcomed paying clients – a mere 20 guided skiers on a January day in 2002 – but the hurdles were high.

“When I signed up for this gig, we were going to be closed Monday through Wednesday and I thought Aaron and I would be out there running the lift and the two of us would be skiing everything we wanted,” she says. “That is not the way it worked out. Would I do it all over again, knowing what I know now?

“No. I mean, why would someone purposefully get into that? But, you know, I really love this work. We are creating something truly special. Everyone up there at the mountain is my best friend in some fashion, and I’m close to my husband, and we get to work on a beautiful mountain every day.”

While hard work has supplanted her dreams of endless powder days with the love of her life, her drive has not faded. She wakes at 5:30 a.m. to be co-owner, business manager, accountant, human-resources director, marketing and public-relations manager, director of customer service and all-round den-mother boss at Silverton Mountain. Since arriving in Silverton, the Brills have taken one vacation: a week- long investor-trolling trip in 2003 through California where they managed to find time for their wedding in Lake Tahoe.

“Most ski areas have 10 people doing what I’m doing. Aaron’s doing the job of 20 people, so there’s no whining to Aaron,” she says. “He tells me all the time, ‘If it was easy, someone would have already done it.”‘

Most everyone in the ski business has heard of her husband, the gangly dreamer from California whose passion for soft snow led him down the path to modern-day pioneer, building a ski area by hand.

But the cliché rings true.

“That saying ‘Behind every good man there’s a great woman’ is so true,” Silverton employee Jess Higgins said. “Jenny is inspiring in so many ways. She maintains a perfect balance while wearing a million hats, while staying loyal to the core of the sport and still getting out there and just ripping.”

Jenny and Aaron met 15 years ago at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California. She was 19. He was 20. He wanted to open his own ski area. She was a double-major in art and environmental studies who grew up ski racing in Vermont. She wanted to ride all day and work for an environmental nonprofit group at night.

Their tests have been plentiful. Big enough to overwhelm most newlyweds. Last year the trials reached their apex.

The BLM review was grinding through its fourth year and the lawsuit from an angry neighbor threatened everything they had done for the past six years. They still had not made a dollar of profit or had a real holiday.

Then even her beloved mountain turned on her. She somersaulted over a couple pillow drops into a dense stand of timber, breaking her right leg. It was her first injury from snowboarding and it nearly broke her.

But good news quickly followed. The BLM granted the Brills a 40-year permit to access the federal land. A judge nixed the lawsuits by their neighbors. Unguided skiing arrived at Silverton, and the buzz grew to a scream as word got out that the Brills’ humble hill had the gnarliest, softest skiing in the Lower 48.

“It’s a very special place. It’s amazing the vision that Jen and Aaron had to create something like this,” says Olympic snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler of Aspen. “It’s great to have strong women in this industry pushing the limits.”

The mountain office has moved from their living room to a 5,000-square-foot office. Last year, money actually started entering their mountain’s seemingly exit-only coffers. The vision became reality.

“Without her it wouldn’t have been possible to take Silverton Mountain beyond a dream into a reality,” Aaron Brill said.

And even with the continuing seven-day workweeks, the predawn mornings and way-past- dark nights, the loss of 20-something frivolity and the increasingly rare run down her own mountain, the wondering is slowly fading.

“I’m finally sleeping better. We used to have this joke that once we got the lift in, it would be all downhill,” Jenny says. “We’ve gotten past the hardest part.

“I sometimes think everything in my life has prepared me for now. My biggest thrill used to be powder, but now, it’s weird, but I really get off on people having the best day of their life and me being a part of that.”

Silverton Mountain

Open: Thursday through Sunday

Schedule: Reservations are required, and guided skiing (groups of eight skiers) through March runs $139 a day. Unguided skiing ($49 lift ticket) opens again in early April.

Hill: One chairlift and an easy but breathtaking hike to 13,487 feet provide more than 3,000 vertical feet to the base.

Jason Blevins covers tourism, mountain business, skiing and outdoor adventure sports for both the business and sports sections at The Denver Post, which he joined in 1997. He skis, pedals, paddles and occasionally boogies in the hills and is just as inspired by the lively entrepreneurial spirit that permeates Colorado's high country communities as he is by the views.

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